It is only through knowing love that the narrator is faced with mourning the loss of Louise. Winterson’s narrator is ultimately faced with the madness of love, the obsessiveness, the desire to keep his/her lover (Louise) healthy and alive. In love you are immediately at risk of the loss of the self, the beloved, and an intense manifestation of jouissance and melancholy. In love, there is a definitely a loss, or rather losses. Theoretically, love has many definitions, often conflicting, psychological and philosophical understandings, abstract notions of its madness, its seductiveness, its pleasures and destructions. Winterson sets love and loss as antithetical and simultaneously synonymous. As loss is part of the grander narrative of cancer, the presence of loss is stronger than the love. Cancer is the Antagonist, the anti-hero that our heroine must contend with. What remains when the love disappears, when the body is hijacked by an alien, a foreign being? The protagonist’s love object, Louise, suffers from cancer. Winterson has offered us groundbreaking novels throughout her literary career, but this text is invested in the discovery of the failed and deformed body. “What remains when the love disappears, when the body is hijacked by an alien, a foreign being?”Īs a literature professor with research areas in Disability Studies, I am interested in the ways in which illness and vulnerability are connected to lovers and our sense of autonomy. What does it mean? Having not read the novel, they are not (yet) aware that the driving force of the novel is loss, rather than love, and that loss writes itself in a very corporeal and concrete way on the body. Or was it a rhetorical question all along? What did she mean? Every time I mention the novel to my students, colleagues or friends, their first question is about the title. Throughout the fragmented narrative, we are faced with a recurring answer: that there will never be closure and never a satisfying response to Winterson’s question.

The narrator’s fascination with love and loss is evident at the very beginning of the novel. For the sake of this commentary, I will briefly state that the novel’s plot revolves around the ambiguously gendered narrator’s love for Louise and the consequent loss that takes place. Winterson’s novel is beautiful in its affair with language, typical of Winterson. “Why is the measure of love loss?” asks Jeanette Winterson in her novel Written on the Body (1994). Through a Disability Studies lens, Dr Shahd Alshammari of Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait discusses Written on the Body, a 1994 novel by Jeanette Winterson, in terms of love and loss and the discovery of the failed and deformed body.

Written on the body jeanette